We had a bit of a “debate” about this recently.
I normally let this go because it makes for a much more interesting discussion. Almost any topic has multiple angles and one thing leads to another, and it’s all good fun.
However sometimes we get a total digression into some other area which has no relevance at all to the original thread.
In the interests of keeping EuroGA a really neat and informative resource: could I ask people to please start a new thread when that happens and when it looks like the diversion has some “meat” in it which is worth a discussion.
I can’t do it myself because
)Many thanks for everyone’s help.
Well, I try.
Firstly, if I start a thread, I think about the subject header carefully, so it appropriately narrows down the discussion to an area which I believe would be valuable to others. Afterwards, I apply the criteria described below.
If somebody else has started a thread, then I look at the subject and whether it is meaningful. So if someone asks how to transit French RA R31A88, but he used “France” as the subject (!!), then I will amend it to “How to cross R31A88 in France”. I will amend it somewhat faster if he didn’t bother to write France with an uppercase F 
Then, if the discussion diverges to another area which I believe is valuable to others, say crossing other French DAs, I will move those posts to a new thread, with an appropriate title like “DA crossing in France”. Obviously creating new threads takes up more time and it cannot be easily done with just a phone. But if somebody posts something which is completely irrelevant (e.g. an extract from the Portugese AIP on DA crossing) that gets more complicated. My default approach is to be laid back and not bother; off topic is quite fun sometimes! And divergence often produces good peripheral (or even non-peripheral) discussions.
But if somebody keeps doing it over and over, and the OT posts don’t have enough “meat” to form a new valuable topic, I might move those posts to the OT/politics thread. In extreme (and rare) cases where this gets out of control and a thread has say 1/3 of posts which are mostly OT and from one poster, I will delete them (which obviously tends to really p1ss off that poster).
To clarify something which came up recently: nobody has been banned for this. Last one related to this was about 7 years ago and he went pretty wild, running slagging-off campaigns (via email addresses he had been collecting for years) in the background, running multiple characters, etc. It was well known at the time.
Roger about all, and thanks for your dedication Peter
All copied Peter and apologies if I’ve contributed to this. +1 on dedication!
I for one am astounded at the effort Peter manages to put into Euro GA.
He is sometimes guilty of pushing his own opinion based on his own experience but is often quite, or very accurate in his observations.
I feel that the moderation of thread drift is about right.
Clearly some topics will diversify, and for the original poster will not go where intended, but such is life.
Generally i feel as a EuroGa community we are all quite respectful and on the occasions where Peter intervenes it’s all quite balanced.
Well said Pete.
I guess that if Peter dedicated less of his time to EuroGA and used that time to further his company, that company would be a major multinational by now. And he would be flying a G650 as an eagle, and leave us to scratch with the chicken. Ah, no, won’t happen, no nice pics to be made from that flight deck
